Maverick’ Puts Tom Cruise On Track To Best Will Smith’s Record Hollywood Payday

With global ticket sales of more than $280 million in just three days, the long-awaited (and Covid-delayed) Top Gun: Maverick is not only thrilling Hollywood with hope that movie theaters are out of the pandemic danger zone, it has put Tom Cruise on a flight path to what seemed impossible just 12 months ago: setting a fresh record for the biggest-ever payday for an actor.

The sequel to the 1986 Top Gun is already the biggest opening weekend in the star’s more than 40 year career and if it maintains momentum could land him more than $100 million — as first reported by Puck News – a sum no one has even come close to on a single film since the start of the streaming wars.

The haul would best Keanu Reeves, who reportedly netted more than $83 million for each film in the Matrix trilogy —which debuted in 1999—and pulled in a total of $250 million earned from a combined box office pot of $1.6 billion. Will Smith holds the record for the best payday from a single movie, reportedly taking home $100 million for his third turn protecting the galaxy in 2012’s Men In Black threequel, which took in $624 million worldwide.

“If [Top Gun] makes $1 billion worldwide,” one entertainment attorney tells Forbes, “nine figures doesn’t sound looney tunes.”

Cruise, 59, is often referred to as one of Hollywood’s last true movie stars. Today he is something of a unicorn due to his longstanding command of first-dollar gross on a film’s backend, the kind of lucrative deal once common for A-list stars that was abandoned when streaming services supplanted traditional movie studios as the driving force in Hollywood. Simply put, Cruise gets paid before the studio does.

In a world with rapidly diminishing theatrical windows and speedy moves to streaming, Cruise’s deal is an anomaly amid the more typical large upfront pay for streaming-only films, or smaller backends that are paid out after the studio makes a theatrical release’s budget back. “We’ll probably end up seeing fewer theaters, fewer screens, and fewer theatrical releases, but there will always be room for tentpole pictures,” one industry insider says.

Cruise received $12.5 million in upfront pay for Maverick and gets over 10% of the first dollar gross, which is based on the money Maverick distributor Paramount takes in after theaters get their cut, typically around 50%. The deal has likely paid Cruise over $30 million total to date, with the possibility of the $90-some million needed to cross the nine figure rubicon to come if Maverick continues to fill theaters before it gets sold to secondary windows, such as airlines, domestic and international TV networks and yes, streaming.

Put another way: in just three days, Cruise made 40% of his total $75 million payday in 2012 for the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which (as of now) is still his highest take-home from a single project. (Puck also reported that Maverick producer Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t receive first dollar gross, but a source close to Bruckheimer says he neither confirmed nor denied that.)

But the advent and ongoing popularity of streaming movies throws a wrench into the earnings works for actors, with paydays that, though sizable, don’t touch the likes of Cruise and Reeves. The largest known payday in streaming was Netflix’s $100 million deal with Daniel Craig for two sequels to 2019’s Knives Out, effectively paying him $50 million for each. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson reportedly nabbed $50 million for Amazon’s upcoming Red One, while Smith’s Best Actor turn in King Richard earned him $40 million.

Streaming earnings are lump sums with the intention of making up for an actor’s lost backend pay, since the Netflixes and Hulus of the world aren’t collecting ticket sales for individual titles in their libraries. These days, however, streamers are likely to hesitate over those big paydays. “With Netflix worth a third of what they were worth two months ago, are they really getting the value of paying $250 million for shows going right to Netflix?” says the attorney. “If the stock price isn’t going to go up all the time, then they can’t spend on content.”

Which begs the question: with Maverick proving non-superhero flicks still stand a chance in theaters, will the big theatrical backends of yore soon return? Or has it gone the way of the jingoistic America portrayed in the first Top Gun? Maverick’s hit status could be a sea change, according to the attorney: “I’m sure Top Gun and the success of other films since Covid stopped will make distributors stop and think about what their release patterns will be.”